Certain clinical conditions can result in an accumulation of fat in the liver. The amount of fat in the liver can be quantified using various magnetic resonance (MR) chemical-shift imaging methods, such as Dixon or spectroscopy. Other clinical conditions can result in an accumulation of various metal species, such as iron or copper, in the liver. The amount of iron in the liver can be correlated using various MR relaxation methods including, for example, multi-echo gradient echo (GRE) methods. In patients where both types of clinical conditions are present, the iron can interfere with quantification of the fat and the fat can interfere with estimation of the iron. Consequently, the concurrent estimation of fat and iron is a challenging task.
Conventional systems use an estimated fat value to perform fat-corrected iron estimation. Then, the iron estimation is used to perform an iron-corrected fat estimation in an iterative manner until a criterion is reached. While this process addresses some of the difficulties involved in fat and iron estimation, the use of iteration is burdensome and error prone. Thus, it is desirable estimate fat and iron concurrently without requiring any iteration between fat and iron estimation methods.